• “The remains of this tower,” says Napier, Florentine History , I 319, note, “still exist in the Piazza de’ Cavalieri, on the right of the archway as the spectator looks toward the clock.” According to Buti it was called the Mew, “because the eagles of the Commune were kept there to moult.” Shelley thus sings of it. Poems , III 91:⁠— “Amid the desolation of a city, Which was the cradle, and is now the grave Of an extinguished people, so that pity Weeps o’er the shipwrecks of oblivion’s wave, There stands the Tower of Famine. It is built Upon some prison-homes, whose dwellers rave For bread, and gold, and blood: pain, linked to guilt, Agitates the light flame of their hours, Until its vital oil is spent or spilt; There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers And sacred domes; each marble-ribbed roof, The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers Of solitary wealth! The tempest-proof Pavilions of the dark Italian air Are by its presence dimmed⁠—they stand aloof, And are withdrawn⁠—so that the world is bare, As if a spectre, wrapt in shapeless terror, Amid a company of ladies fair Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue, The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error, Should be absorbed till they to marble grew.” ↩